Music is a temporal medium, the organization of sound in time. Accordingly, music making is highly timing sensitive. When a musician presses a key on a piano, the musician expects the result to be immediately audible. Any delay in hearing the sound, even as brief as few milliseconds, produces a perceived sluggishness that impedes the ability of the musician to use the instrument.
Music making is also often a collaborative effort among many musicians who interact with each other. One form of musical interaction popular among non-musicians is provided by a video game genre known as “rhythm-action,” which requires a player to perform phrases from a pre-recorded musical composition using the video game's input device to simulate a musical instrument. The best-known example of this genre is the BEATMANIA series of games published by Konami Co., Ltd. of Japan. An example of the game environment provided by BEATMANIA is shown in FIG. 1. In this series of games the notes in musical phrases are graphically displayed to the player as a series of visual markers 104 spaced along one or more timelines 110, 120, 130, 140; each marker 104 corresponds to one note in the phrase. In the environment shown in FIG. 1 the visual markers move from the top of the display to the bottom of the display. As each marker 104 on the scrolling timelines passes a graphical cursor 108 displayed along this timeline, the player must simultaneously press a button on the input device corresponding to the correct timeline to play the sound of the corresponding note at the correct time. If the player performs this action successfully for a sufficient percentage of the notes, he scores well and wins the game. If the player fails to perform this action successfully for a sufficient percentage of the notes, he scores poorly and loses the game. Two or more players may compete against each other, typically by each one attempting to play back different, parallel musical phrases from the same song simultaneously (shown in FIG. 1). The player who plays the highest percentage of notes correctly achieves the highest score and wins.
Multiplayer gaming increasingly incorporates various networking technologies that allow multiple players to compete against each other from remote physical locations via networks, and networked multiplayer gaming has become extremely popular. Unfortunately, however, the latency inherent in networked communication imposes a significant engineering and design burden on video game developers: data signals are often subject to large and unpredictable transmission delays. These transmission delays do not significantly impact turn-based games (such as chess) or other game genres in which timing sensitivity is not critical to gameplay. In action games and other “real-time” games, however, gameplay is extremely sensitive to the timing of various events, and transmission delays inherently result in inconsistencies continually forming between the local game states of the various players of a networked game. Consequently, developers of timing-sensitive networked games have had to invent various methods for gracefully performing “conflict resolution” to resolve divergent local game states.
The rhythm-action genre has a unique attribute, however, that makes traditional conflict resolution methods inapplicable. Specifically, the core activity of multiplayer rhythm-action involves simultaneous music-making, which is highly timing sensitive, by two or more players. If these two players are separated by a network, the data representing musical notes played by one player will incur transmission delays when being sent to the other player. If note data were simply transmitted to a receiving machine it would trigger corresponding audio that would sound “out of sync” to the receiving player, resulting in cacophony. One solution to this problem would be to mute the audio from remote players on the local player's machine. However, this would significantly degrade the entertainment value of the game experience by destroying musical communication between the players.
Therefore, a need exists for a system and method that enable musicians to achieve the experience of real-time musical interaction over a high-latency network, such as the Internet.